My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
What new tech arrived after smartphones anyway?
LLMs/ChatGPT and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion. Prompting them to get something useful out is an art in itself.
Occasionally I’ll be doing something manually before I realize “wait this is drugdework that ChatGPT can do for me”. I think that kind of mental shift will be difficult or scary for many people, whereas the kids who are in school now will be raised with it as a default option to do their work.
VR headsets
Casting
AR glasses will likely be common in 10 years.
Brainwave interface will probably be a thing in 20 years.
Meh, too expensive without much useful applications. Even then it’s just a display that you put on your eyes.
Seriously? Secondary display is a new technology? It is wireless but it’s still just another display.
Wouldn’t hold my breath for this tbh. And again it is not some radical technology with multiple usecases. It’s just a gopro with a screen.
Very true. The next “great” technology will not be something that came before. Like prior to the iphone people just wanted smaller phones. They didn’t care about screen size. Just look at the phone Ben Stiller uses in Zoolander. That’s what people thought the future was.
Bill Gates (yeah boo, I know) said:
This is borrowed from others. It basically means fucking VR is going to be peanuts compared to what we will have in 10 years. Probably will just need to ask the phone “do this for me”.
Billy probably learned after his 640kb RAM comment 😆
Regarding your dismissal of AR glasses:
You could’ve argued that the iPhone was just a fluffed up Palm Pilot or Windows CE device, but with a more limited Apple OS. Doesn’t make it less of a big deal, in terms of technological turning points.
Just because a device is merely an iteration on what’s come before doesn’t mean it isn’t popularizing a novel computing paradigm.
With respect to VR, if you think the display tech is all there is to it, you must’ve not been following VR since the Oculus DK2 (or perhaps you’ve only tried gen-1 PSVR?). The tracking and motion controls are insanely good. Playing a game with a controller or keyboard+mouse is nothing at all like swinging a sword or aiming a gun with your own body. Even exploration games like Myst feel completely different.
This is all great but there’s nothing about AR/VR that poses as a barrier for entry for the new users the same way computers or mobiles posed a challenge.
Computers and mobiles demanded you to explore and understand the technology if you wanted to interact with it.
Now we’re in era of ease of access where everything is just a click away.
Honestly, if our generation is going to struggle with a technology then it is not going to be any tech available today.